Veto Players and Government Productivity in Central Eastern Europe

Veto player theory generates predictions about governments’ capacity for policy change, though has often be analyzed in cases of stable democratic policy-making. Systematic cross-national evaluations of the explanatory power of veto player theory is less common in transitioning democracies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory in young democracies, a dataset was gathered that incorporates over 3,500 government socio-economic reforms across 8 former Communist and Soviet countries for 35 years from the time of transition until 2015. As these countries also experienced severe crisis-driven police change and changes to governing ideologies, we are able to compare veto player theory to those based on political economy (crisis-driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology-driven policy change). Given the time period, we are also able to identify whether different modes of policy-making were dominant during different time periods of the transition (e.g. prior to or after EU accession). These findings improve our understanding of reform making in transitioning democracies and highlight the generalizability of theories developed in Western Europe into other policy environments.